The recent AF Post Byrne thread made me dig this up... sorry about the Necro Post (6 years... is that too long?)

And I am not sure if this forum does Spoiler tags because when I go to Advanced, it all looks wonky and I can't tell if one of the buttons supports "Spoiler" tags...

But Wendy & Richard Pini returned to ElfQuest to celebrate 40 years of pointed ears... for a series (ran - what? 30 issues?) called "Final Quest."

I won't go into details - but the series makes a horrible mistake.

It assumes you, the reader, have read everything. It exiles any chance of new readers picking this up and enjoying it. It also exiles readers, who may not have this stuff memorized. Granted, you can read all the old stuff - free, legally - on their site (see first post) - but it's not friendly at all for anyone to try and pick up and run with.

And it's just... poorly written, and poorly drawn (in my opinion) because Wendy employed someone named Sonny to help with art and coloring.

The problem is - Wendy as an artist has ranked as one of my favorites (from her original three series, see the first post) - and what I saw in Final Quest was not growth, but reversal, for me anyway.

And the ending... is... just... Game of Thrones ending level. I mean it.

So they launched another limited series called "Stargazer's Quest" which focuses on Skywise and his daughter Jink, as Wendy continues to try and tie everything together. And again, exiles any potential new readers.

The problem lies here - mentioned in a previous post in this thread (http://alphaflight.net/showthread.ph...ll=1#post95132) ...

After Original Quest, Siege at Blue Mountain and Kings of the Broken Wheel (the three original series, by the creators) - they opened up ElfQuest to let everyone and their mother write it. As a result, titles such as Hidden Years, Shards, New Blood, Blood of Ten Chiefs, Kahvi, Two-Spear, Jink (don't get me started...), and The Rebels (so, so, so very painful), all emerged. Some of them were good - some of them were good in parts - some (Jink and especially The Rebels) were down right horrible (and I have no idea how Richard and Wendy Pini were okay with those stories being published under the ElfQuest brand).

She's trying to tie in all this stuff that other people did that were free to write whatever (if they ran these ideas past Wendy and Richard first, I'd be very surprised, because so many of these are very un-ElfQuest)...

So she's trying to wrap it all up, make it all make sense... and it's like Alphabet Soup... you can have a ton of letters, make some words, maybe a sentence or two, but good luck making all the letters make sense...

It's been disappointing. Yet I collect it because it's ElfQuest.